I’m taking up yawning as my new therapeutic exercise

I laughed when a friend talked about yawning therapy – now I’m a convert, writes Christine Manby

Illustration by Tom Ford

Thanks to the rise of social media, we’ve become used to people sharing the sort of information that 15 years ago we would have thought “a bit too much”. I open Facebook with my fingers over my eyes in case the first thing that pops up is a picture of someone’s ingrown toenail or a body part sporting a cannula in the hope of a “you OK hun?” I thought I’d seen it all until one of my Facebook friends posted a video of herself yawning so widely that I could see what she’d had for breakfast. Hadn’t anyone ever told her to cover her mouth? What on earth was my Facebook friend thinking?

“Today in therapy, my psychiatrist got me to yawn and I have never felt so good,” she wrote.

Really? That sounded suspicious. Wasn’t it more likely the case that the therapy session made the psychiatrist want to yawn so badly that she passed it off as a joint exercise? How could yawning be therapeutic?